On a list of unpleasant things occurring to players in any MMO, “getting your character deleted while you’re still playing” is probably near the top of that list. It was also something that started happening in AdventureQuest 3D, much to the surprise of the game’s development team. The good news is that the problem has been fixed, the better news is that the characters were not permanently deleted and can be restored, and the best news for people who love hearing details about these things is that you can learn all of the details in a full-on story about what happened and why.

The short version is that someone found a way to essentially “trick” the servers into accepting that a DDoS attacker was logging in with the account of other players, followed by triggering the character deletion (which actually just sends the characters in question to a queue for permanent deletion, hence ensuring that you can have your character restored). It’s far more detail than you usually get in stories about these sorts of hacking, so if you love a good detective story about account breaches, you’ll have fun with this one.

“It was late Saturday night and our servers were being pounded with another round of DDOS attacks (distributed denial of service attacks). It had been going on since Thursday afternoon. Well, technically, it goes on all the time. They say you hit it in the big leagues when you’re popular enough to have groups of haters out to get you. Apparently, we have been in the big leagues for over a decade. Over the past year we have taken a three pronged approach to mitigating DDOS attacks. Because of this, players do not notice most of them at all. They are literally happening all the time.”

That’s pretty rough. These people are really nice too and are a really decent company, and they still are hammered non stop by this stuff. The people doing these attacks are criminals and they suck :P